A gruelling diet beloved by Instagrammers cuts out everything from alcohol to dairy -- here's how well it works

Timolina/ShutterstockFish, veggies, and eggs are staples of the Whole30 diet.

Do you want to stop drinking alcohol and cut all sugar, grains, beans, peanuts, and dairy from your plate for a month? Then the Whole30 diet is for you.

Created in 2009 by then husband-and-wife pair Melissa and Dallas Hartwig, the premise of the monthlong regime is that if you put only “good” things in your body you’ll feel better, reduce inflammation, and transform your relationship with food.

Melissa, a former heroin addict, came up with the plan after she left rehab, quit smoking, joined a gym, and started eating healthier. She shared what worked so well for her with the masses, and the Instagrammable hashtag #Whole30, which to date has spawned 3.4 million posts, was born.

Whole30 involves a lot of diet restriction and willpower, which means the diet may not be the right choice for everyone. In fact, it ranked near the bottom of the list of US News & World Report’s 40 best diets of 2018.

Here’s how it works.

There are at least seven big no-no’s on the Whole30 diet.

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The first: absolutely no alcohol all 30 days. This includes cooking with wine. Whole30 is meant to be a kind of radical body cleanse, and for that reason the inventors also ask people to refrain from smoking during the 30 days of the fast.

If you eat out or nibble on something in a package, make sure it doesn’t contain any seaweed-derived carrageenan thickeners in it or MSG (monosodium glutamate).

Whole30 also says that sulfites are banned from the diet, but dieters are still allowed to season with balsamic vinegar and cook eggs, even though both of those contain sulfites. (Sulfite sensitivity is a fairly rare condition, affecting between 1 in 20 and 1 in 100 asthmatics.)

In fact, there are several ways that Whole30 lets you break its strict regime: clarified butter is OK, though real butter is not, and iodized table salt, which contains some sugar is allowed. It’s not clear why Whole30 made these exceptions, but without them the diet would be extremely hard to follow.

Don’t even think about stepping on the scale this month.

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You aren’t allowed to weigh yourself, and you don’t need to count calories on the diet.

That’s a strange strategy because regular weigh-ins are generally considered a helpful way to maintain a healthy weight for the long haul.

Other processed foods you might crave, like cookies, pancakes, pizzas, and chips, are also not welcome on your journey — even if they’re made from ingredients that are technically not on the “banned” Whole30 list.

Hollis Johnson

Anything you enjoyed eating before that you don’t think is “psychologically healthy” for your diet isn’t a good idea, according to Whole30.

The premise is that by severely restricting what you eat for a month, you’re clearing out your system and figuring out what causes inflammation, while also changing your relationship with food.

No sugar or sweeteners are allowed. But since fruit juice comes from fruit (which you are allowed to eat) this is one way you could sweeten things up for the month.

The diet allows a little fruit juice to flavour sauces, soups, and entrees. But drinking a glass of fruit juice is not in the spirit of the diet, and juice has less nutritional value than a piece of fruit, so don’t think you’re going to sip your way through the month.

Eggs, fruit, and natural fats like avocados, cashews, coconut products, and olive oil are basically the rest of your diet.

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Whole30 also recommends some supplements, including fish oil, vitamin D, magnesium, and probiotics.

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Research tells us that, with the notable exception of Vitamin D, it’s probably better to get those things in foods, not pills.

In short, Whole30 is not the cheapest diet you could pick out.

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But you’ll probably be preparing a lot more food at home, and not drinking, which may help balance out the cost of buying extra meats, fish, and fresh fruit.

It’s also not the best diet for the earth.

Ben NighSee this really delicious, healthy hummus? You can’t eat this on the Whole 30.

If everyone in the world decided to embark on the Whole30 diet, we’d all be pretty hungry. There simply aren’t enough eggs, meat, and fish to go around when we’re not eating other protein sources.

Whole30 is a very strict diet: If you slip up and eat a banned food, it’s back to day one.

Diet experts say the goal of the Whole30, a healthier relationship with food, is an admirable one. But many argue this diet goes about it in a counterproductive way.

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Dietitian Jessica Penner isn’t a fan: “The Whole 30 is a short-term solution to a long-term problem,” she writes on her website.

The founders call the plan a “short-term nutrition reset” After 30 days, you can slowly add more banned foods back in to your daily routine.

AmazonNow what?

The idea is that you pay attention to how you feel as you begin adding more foods to your plate, and limit those that make you feel inflamed and sluggish. Nutrition experts caution that 30 days may not really be enough for your body to reset, though.

“In a clinical setting, we put patients on these sorts of restrictive diets for three months, because the immune system needs three months to shut off,” Alessio Fasano, director of the Center for Celiac Research and Treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Time. “Thirty days isn’t enough time to turn off systemic inflammation.”

While Whole30 aims to improve people’s relationship with food, it can sometimes have the opposite effect, shaming people into feeling awful for slipping up and eating a “bad” food, or forcing them to give up on the diet because they decide they don’t have what it takes.